Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Future of Islamic State: Not Merely Religion

As the threat from Islamic State (also known as IS or ISIS
or by its Arabic acronym of Daesh) continued to grow, US-led coalition forces
intensified their aerial attacks on IS militants and strategic installations in
Syria and Iraq, in a concerted effort to destroy and degrade the self-styled
caliphate. However, far from caving in, IS has expanded its territorial reach
by moving across the Mediterranean Sea into Libya's coastal region, the Sahel
and West Africa.

Some scholars argue that the ability of IS to attract
foreign fighters as well as idealistic Muslims from across the globe willing to
become cannon fodder in suicide missions at home, make it a lethal force and
very dangerous to any government willing to confront it. These analysts say
that the militants' ideology has been fuelled by the austere and puritanical
interpretation of Islam by Saudi Arabia, a country which has significantly
advanced Salafi-Wahhabi beliefs (a return to Islam as espoused by the first
three generations of Muslims who are collectively known as the salaf).

German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, in a rare attack by a
Western official, accused Saudi Arabia recently of financing extremist mosques
and communities in the West that constitute a security risk and warned that it
must stop. “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away
is over,” Gabriel said in a German newspaper interview. “Wahhabi mosques all
over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Islamists who are a threat to
public safety come from these communities in Germany,” he said.

Algerian author and columnist Kamal Daoud wrote in The New
York Times recently that the penchant of IS for beheading, killing, stoning,
and amputating victims; and despising women and non-Muslims, mirrors the
practice of Saudi Arabia. “The kingdom relied on an alliance with a religious
clergy that produces, legitimises, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the
ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on," Daoud declared.

The difference was that Saudi Arabia, governed by a
labyrinthine ruling family-religious complex, was less crude in the way it
presented itself to the global community. Daoud asserted that Saudi Arabia was
what IS rule could look like once it had settled in and discarded its jihadist
and expansionist tendencies.

Mainstream Muslim scholars, including those in Southeast
Asia, have long warned that Wahhabism threatens other versions of Islam in
countries where the Muslims are either a majority or a minority. British author
and former intelligence officer Alastair Crooke believes that IS has undermined
the legitimacy of the Saudi ruling family by returning to the rigours of the
18th century alliance between the founding fathers of modern Saudi Arabia and
the fundamentalist Sunni preacher Sheikh Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab who rejected
as innovation everything that had been introduced after the salaf.

To be sure, IS in its present reiteration, was not created
by Saudi Arabia; it was forged in the wake of the US toppling of Saddam Hussein
in 2003 by among others the disbandment of Saddam Hussein's army, whose senior
officers were mostly Sunnis who already had Islamist networks; the insurgency
and civil war between Iraqi Shias and Sunnis that continues to this day; and
the morphing of Al-Qaeda in Iraq into ISIS, which was in turn energised by
civil strife in Syria and evolved into IS.

These militant groups expanded and consolidated under the
umbrella of IS, culminating in the singular act of declaring a caliphate that
covers Iraq and the Levant (which includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine
and Syria). IS challenges Saudi Arabia for the allegiance of Sunnis across the
Middle East. The group’s ultimate objective is to set up the first major
caliphate since the demise of the last caliph with the breaking up of the
Ottoman Empire by Western imperial powers in the wake of the First World War.
IS strives to spread Salafi-Islamic rule across the globe.

Conscious of the enormous political and strategic fallout
from IS’ affinity with Saudi Arabia’s religious, social and moral system as
well as other forms of association with IS (such as the use of Saudi secondary
school books in Mosul, Iraq, after its capture by IS in 2014), the Saudi
government has come to view the militants as a threat. It has over the years
condemned militants led by Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and IS leader Abu
Bakr al Baghdadi.

In response to the November 2015 bloody rampage in Paris,
the Saudi rulers have called on the international community to "eradicate
this (referring to IS) dangerous and destructive plague". Saudi Arabia
clearly does not want the world to identify the kingdom’s puritan
interpretation of Islam with IS and jihadism despite the fact that it has
served as a breeding ground for ever more virulent strands of the faith.

That said, it was King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, whose
mother was a descendant of Abdul Wahhab, who advocated modernity in the
conservative kingdom while at the same time launching Wahhabism’s global
proselytisation campaign on the back of the huge cash revenues earned in the
wake of the 1973 oil embargo that sent oil prices skyrocketing. Some reasoned
that Faisal's campaign was initially payback for the support of the ulama
(religious scholars) in a protracted power struggle with his brother, King Saud
that ultimately secured him the throne.

British author and religious scholar Karen Armstrong
suggests that IS may have over-reached itself with its unsustainable policies
and jihadist philosophy. A majority of Sunnis and Shias reject what IS stands
for. Armstrong notes that Saudi Arabia, with its impressive counter-terrorist
resources, has already thwarted IS attacks in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia and
other Gulf states nonetheless have made clear that dealing with IS does not top
their priorities. The kingdom and its Gulf allies, bogged down in an
intractable war in Yemen viewed by the Saudis as a proxy war against Iran, have
effectively withdrawn militarily from the US-led campaign against IS.

The key to removing the challenge from IS has to be the
realisation that the terror group’s appeal is not its alleged goal of an
atavistic return to the glorious past of Islam, as Armstrong put it. Nor is Islam
at the core of its multiple conflicts. The current appeal of IS is the
opportunity it offers the socially, economically and ethnically disenfranchised
to revolt and its ability with the help of technological advances to take the
battle to historically new levels. Military defeat of IS will not soothe the
anger of the disenfranchised. Addressing their concerns will.

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,
co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, a
syndicated columnist, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog and a forthcoming book with
the same title.Mushahid Ali is a Senior Fellow in RSIS.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Sporticos

Ads

Soccer Results

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer does not promote, link to or provide videos from any online sources who distribute illegal streaming content over the Internet with domains registered in the United States of America

Top 100 Soccer Sites

Subscribe To

Subscribe by Email

About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile